[Cairo] Text API proposal

[Owen Taylor]

On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 05:06, Thorsten Behrens wrote:
> Yesterday, Carl wrote:
> 
> > So, I have two questions:
> >
> > fontconfig
> > ----------
> > Does anyone have a problem with Cairo exporting fontconfig as
> > proposed? fontconfig is quite portable and I, (speaking as a user),
> > would love to have a standard cross-platform means for naming fonts,
> > etc.
> >
> If I got Owen right, he plans something like that (or what should
> CairoWin32Font stand for?).

No, that wasn't part of my proposal. In my proposal CairoWin32Font
was just an opaque handle that support the generic "CairoFont"
operations.

> > Freetype
> > --------
> > Does anyone have concrete suggestions for what API to push down into
> > Cairo in order to abstract away Freetype? If someone smart can
> > convince me to do that, and tell me how, I might be able to overcome
> > my laziness.
> >
> No idea about that. How about an API that deals exactly with the
> functionality needed by Cairo? Makes porter's life much more easy.
> 
> Generally speaking, I have the impression that we're theorizing here. The
> thing Cairo will benefit the most are actual ports to Windows and OSX.

I'd definitely agree with that; it's hard to predict all issues in
advance.

> Only then, potential issues will show up. From what we can tell, the Cairo
> glyph interface will not suffice for Windows. If Owen got Pango working
> with Uniscribe and a glyph API, all the better (would be interesting, how
> broad test coverage for that version has been, though).

See my other mail.

Regards,
						Owen